Burnaby Central Park is a beautiful park, one of the largest in the city and surrounding area. The park has a mix of recreational facilities – such as tennis courts, a golf course and a large stadium – as well as a large network of trails. Due to its size and complexity, the park is difficult to navigate with the current wayfinding system the park implements. This was the issue our redesign, consisting of an app and new signage, was designed to fix.

This project was developed in a team of three for our information design course, IAT 235. My main roles were programming the high-fidelity prototype of the application and designing the user experience. The application was developed using Actionscript 3 and Adobe Flex, which allowed us to test on an Android tablet during development.

We began the design process by looking at what the park had to offer. How could we best present this information to users? What were the most important aspects to them? We developed several personas and scenarios to help us understand our users’ motivations and desires.

Early design sketch exploring trail hierarchy.

Early design sketch looking at facilities in the park and how to represent them.

We ended up creating 3 main ways for users to find locations. They could search by activity (such as “tennis”), point of interest, or use the quick find feature. Quick find plotted the closest path to common locations such as bathrooms and picnic tables.

Early design sketches detailing interface and required features.

We also created a feature called the route planner. This allows users to select locations and add them to a route, allowing them to plan how they would spend their time at the park.

Screenshot of the Route Planner feature.

This project was a fantastic learning experience; I learned a great deal about information and interaction design, as well as how the user centered design process works. I developed valuable skills in creating realistic and well developed personas and scenarios. It was also a great exercise in object-oriented programming, and practice in implementing more advanced data structures and algorithms, such as the A* wayfinding algorithm, which we used to find the shortest distance between locations.

The Thief is a short movie I created for a film course with a team of peers. I directed, produced and wrote the movie, as well as doing some of the editing. The movie is based off of a short story I wrote prior that year, also called The Thief.

Originally, we had a very different film in mind. We were originally going to create a short film looking at comic books, specifically the life of an ordinary person in a comic book universe. It was going to be a special effects heavy film, drawing inspiration from the movie Scott Pilgrim. However, we decided to focus more on a narrative than on special effects, and switched to telling the story of The Thief.

We began by developing a storyboard directly off of the short story. This storyboard was revised many times during production as locations changed and we decided to focus more on specific scenes. The final storyboard is available here.

After completing the storyboard, we moved directly into shooting the film. Filming took place over several weeks, in various locations in Surrey and Burnaby.

Editing was done primarily in Adobe Premiere, with special effects added in Adobe After Effects.

This project was valuable for both the technical skills I gained – editing with Premiere and After Effects, some sound design – as well as experience in coordinating actors, locations and equipment for a project of this scale. I also learned more about my own strengths and weaknesses in storytelling, and gained some insight into how to improve those skills.

The Cineplex mobile app is designed to allow users to easily purchase tickets to movies at supported theatres. It also allows users to view the Cineplex magazine, read movie news, and view media such as movie trailers and images. However, the app has many issues from the perspectives of usability and user experience, which were addressed in the Cineplex app redesign. This project was completed for my Human Computer Interaction class, with a group of 4 other peers. I was team leader, the primary writer of the documentation, and did some interface design.

We began by evaluating the app against a set of usability heuristics. We found that the original app had many issues with consistency and simplicity, and used this information to focus the rest of our redesign. We brainstormed various ideas about the focus of the app, as well as what features were the most, and least, important to users. Finally, we conducted a set of user tests with the current app, to see if the results matched our expectations, and see what the most important issues to tackle with our redesign were.

The Usability Heuristics violated by the current Cinplex app.

Affinity diagram used to brainstorm ideas about most important features in the app.

We developed two prototypes to try and solve the issues faced in the original app. Both of these designs were then evaluated in further user studies.

Redesigning the Cineplex app was a fantastic lesson in the difference between usability and user experience, and where to apply each of those concepts. It was also excellent practice in evaluating an existing design, then documenting and presenting its faults and virtues. This team was also one of the larger teams I’ve worked on, the coordination of which was also a valuable learning experience.